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Jon Christensen

University of California, Los Angeles, Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, Faculty Member

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Jon Christensen teaches and conducts multidisciplinary research at UCLA focusing on equity and the environment, strategic environmental communication, and journalism, media, and storytelling. He is an adjunct assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, Luskin Center for Innovation, and Center for Digital Humanities at UCLA. He is a founder of the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies in the IoES and editor of LENS Magazine, and a producer of ‘Earth Focus,’ a documentary series produced in collaboration with PBS SoCal. He is also a partner and strategic adviser at Stamen Design, a National Design Award-winning interactive design and technology firm specializing in mapping, data visualization, and strategic communications.

Jon was executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, an interdisciplinary center for research, teaching, new media, and journalism at Stanford University before coming to UCLA. He has been an environmental journalist and science writer for more than 30 years. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Nature, High Country News, and many other newspapers, magazines, journals, and radio and television shows.

Jon was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 2002-2003 and a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University in 2003-2004, before returning to Stanford to work on a Ph.D. in environmental history and the history of science.

Jon serves on the boards of directors of the Liberty Hill Foundation and the Los Angeles River State Park Partners, and on the advisory councils of the Indigenous Law Center at the University of California School of Law, San Francisco, and the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust.

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Elizabeth Rayburn

Mariam Andrawiss

Babu Rao Vundinti

National Institute of Immunohaematology, Mumbai

Constantinos Stathopoulos

Alfredo Berzal-herranz

Ramiro Mendoza Maldonado

LNCIB - Laboratorio Nazionale del Consorzio Interuniversitario per le Biotecnologie

Lorena Tedeschi

Andrew Westwell

Cardiff University

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Papers by Jon Christensen

Don't shoot the messenger

Drug Discovery Today, 2003

spatial history lab 17 June 2009 Bay Area Conservation and Development

This study examines regional land-use questions in the Silicon Valley, and more broadly in the Ba... more This study examines regional land-use questions in the Silicon Valley, and more broadly in the Bay Area, through the historical analysis of open space conservation and urban development trends. Our research began by analyzing larger historical conservation and development trends in the Bay Area. Drawing from our findings, we then created a counterfactual map using GIS and focused our research question on a “what if” proposition—what would have happened to the currently preserved lands in the Silicon Valley had they been developed. The results of this study are currently in review.

The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities

The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, 2017

Chapter 1. Bending the Curve: Ten Scalable Solutions for Carbon Neutrality and Climate Stability

Collabra, 2016

We are living in a world of over seven billion people, with annual greenhouse gas emissions of ap... more We are living in a world of over seven billion people, with annual greenhouse gas emissions of approximately 50 billion tons a year and rising steadily. If continued unabated, the world is on target to warm by about 2 °C in less than 40 years, pushing the climate to a regime unlike any that has been witnessed in the last million years. Nonetheless, we still have time to avert such a catastrophic scenario, or delay its occurrence by several decades to provide human societies and the ecosystem with the time to adjust. In order to mitigate the possibility of climate disruption, we need to recognize that fossil fuel based technologies have become outdated and transform the energy system to that of low-carbon, sustainable and secure energy systems. In addition, we have to mitigate emissions of the four short-lived climate pollutants to bring immediate relief from climate change and protect vulnerable societies. Stability of the climate system involves not only the centrality of scientifi...

Aux Barricades!

Conservation in Practice, 2006

Fortress conservation is making a comeback. Don't be fooled by all the happy talk about

Sitting Out the Big Game

Conservation in Practice, 2005

It's a shame. Conservationists are sitting on the sidelines while the Big Game unfolds before our... more It's a shame. Conservationists are sitting on the sidelines while the Big Game unfolds before our eyes. A major campaign is under way to change the terms of development, alleviate crushing debt, and help poor people around the world live better lives. Successes are being racked up. And conservation and environmental groups are nowhere to be seen. There are 29 groups listed as partners in The Campaign to Make Poverty History at www.one.org. Not one of them is a conservation or environmental organization.

Assessing the flow to low-income urban areas of conservation and environmental funds approved by California’s Proposition 84

PLOS ONE, 2019

Mapping Texts: Combining Text-Mining and Geo-Visualization To Unlock The Research Potential of Historical Newspapers

Paper on mapping texts and combining text-mining and geo-visualization to unlock the research pot... more

Sharing our Stories: Interpreting the Estuary

Multispecies Justice in the Wetlands

European journal of literature, culture and the environment, 2020

This essay discusses the rise of "justice" as a central concept around which environmen... more This essay discusses the rise of "justice" as a central concept around which environmental thought and debates have been organized over the last thirty years, and briefly places the notions of environmental justice and multispecies justice into the more general context of theories of justice since John Rawls. It uses the case of the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve in Los Angeles, whose future is hotly contested between different environmentalist groups, as a case study to illustrate the complex trade-offs that environmental decision-making currently confronts, and to suggest in what ways the invocation of multispecies justice changes the participants in the community of justice and the way in which their claims on humans' moral consideration should be weighed.

Measuring Performance of Water Systems in California

The authors wish to acknowledge Barton H. " Buzz " Thompson, who participated in many i... more The authors wish to acknowledge Barton H. " Buzz " Thompson, who participated in many interviews and discussions essential to the preparation of this working paper, as well as the dozens of people who met and talked with us about performance measurement in water systems throughout California, and the support of the S. The state of information about water in California is woefully inadequate. Given that California has long been a center for innovation in the world's emerging information economy and water is among the state's most precious resources, this is nothing short of shocking. In its 2009 Water Plan, the state Department of Water Resources recognized the inadequacies and inefficiencies of the state's information systems: " Easily retrievable, standardized, and comprehensive baseline data about California urban water use are not available. " The plan went on to note that DWR " agreed to begin the effort of improving information exchange by e...

Mapping Historical Texts: Combining Text-mining & Geo-visualization to Unlock the Research Potential of Historical Newspapers

Strategic Communication to Achieve Carbon Neutrality within the University of California

Author(s): Bales, Roger; Christensen, Jon; Heeren, Alex; Hodges, Heather; Leombruni, Lisa; Rebich... more

Auditing Conservation in an Age of Accountability. Instead of seeing conservation as just a good cause, people are starting to ask, "What are your results?

Conservation in Practice

Are We Consuming Too Much?. It turns out we may be worrying too much about how much we consume and far too little about how to invest

Conservation in Practice, 2005

The answer to the question may seem obvious. But it's not. Not even to Paul Ehrlich, who has spen... more The answer to the question may seem obvious. But it's not. Not even to Paul Ehrlich, who has spent his life warning of impending disaster for our overweening consumer culture. Ehrlich's latest book, One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future, written with his wife Anne, takes its title from a Rudyard Kipling poem. "Recessional" is a cautionary verse about the hubris that went before the fall of Nineveh, the once-thriving capital of the ancient Assyrian empire on the Tigris River in present-day Iraq. The Ehrlichs argue that if we don't curb our wanton ways, a similar fate awaits us. But in a paper recently published in the prestigious Journal of Economic Perspectives (1), Paul Ehrlich joined a group of nearly a dozen of the world's most ambitious ecologists and economists to try to put some hard numbers behind worldwide concerns about sustainability. They boldly entitled the paper "Are We Consuming Too Much?" There are, of course, places where the biggest problem is definitely not that people are consuming too much. It's that they're consuming far too little. Think Africa. Consumption is obviously inadequate when people are dying of malnutrition. But insufficient investment also means that the next generation of Africans will have less than this generation, and the generation after that still less. This is a death spiral of declining consumption and investment, two keys to well-being and sustainability But what about us? And by this, I mean those of us living in the United States and other rich countries. The answer Ehrlich and his colleagues came up with will be shocking to some. And it will come as a surprise to many. It even surprised some of the authors, including Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow.

Reconstructing the conservation history of California over the last 80 years

ABSTRACT Background/Question/Methods Exceptionally rapid human-caused changes in climate and habi... more ABSTRACT Background/Question/Methods Exceptionally rapid human-caused changes in climate and habitats threaten the persistence of biodiversity. Learning from conservation history can help us strategically define future conservation goals. Conservation history describes the process through which current day conservation came to place. Documenting this process entails a spatial and temporal depiction of historical conservation activities, implementation, and achievements. Using historical (1930-1940&#39;s - Wieslander Vegetation Type Maps) and current (2006-2008 - CalVeg) land cover maps, we conducted a change detection analysis to assess the amount and locations of change in the San Francisco Bay Area region. Results/Conclusions In the overlapping area of the historical and current land cover maps (8800km2), 85% has changed over the last 80 years. Of the historical extent, grasslands and urban areas were the land cover classes that transitioned the least, and oak woodlands and agriculture transitioned the most. The greatest transition went into urban areas (from 386km2 to 2144km2), and greatest loss from agriculture (3205 km2 to 515 km2). Using the map of Open Space areas, we linked the chronology of protection, conservation targets, with historical landmarks. Since 1850, 3723 Open Space properties have been &quot;acquired&quot; (2960 km2) in the overlapping area of the historical map. To date we have been able to track the acquisition dates of 1737 of these properties (2116 km2; ca. 70% area). Of those Open space areas with acquisition dates, we observe that the greatest boom of acquisition occurred after 1960, with 1575km2 after 1960 and 541km2 before 1960. This matches the funds provided by the 1955 funding for State Park acquisition, and some of the funds of the 1945 Omnibus Parks Acquisition Act (to acquire coastal areas). There was high variability on which land cover classes were protected and when. After 1960, there was a major increase in agricultural lands, grasslands and redwood forests (after an initial effort in 1920&#39;s) in Open Space properties. We expect to expand and apply this same framework to California&#39;s network of Open Space areas to further our understanding of the history of the region&#39;s protection.

What’s the Matter with San Francisco?

Boom: A Journal of California, 2014

With San Francisco’s economy booming and hand-wringing about the city’s hyper-gentrification, the... more With San Francisco’s economy booming and hand-wringing about the city’s hyper-gentrification, the authors argue that much of the debate surrounding San Francisco’s challenges have been focusing on the wrong things. Changes to the region’s demographics aren’t just squeezing out the middle and working class; they are destroying the conditions that made the Bay Area able to foster social mobility better than any other city in the United States in recent decades.

Win-Win Illusions. Over the past two decades, efforts to heal the rift between poor people and protected areas have foundered. So what next?

Conservation in Practice, 2004

Win-Win Illusions Over the past two decades, efforts to heal the rift between poor people and pro... more

Diverse drivers of contemporary species shifts in the California flora

Background/Question/Methods The differential responses of plant species to global warming are of ... more Background/Question/Methods The differential responses of plant species to global warming are of great interest and grave concern for scientists and conservationists. We used 665234 georeferenced herbaria records to estimate geographic and climatic shifts over the past century in 4426 plant taxa from a wide range of bioclimatic life zones, functional types, and phylogeographic origins. Species distributions were estimated from the Bayesian posterior distribution of parameters defining the relative abundance of specimens of a target species along an environmental gradient, contingent on the sampling distribution of all specimens collected along the gradient, in the geographic locality of the target species. Results/Conclusions Here we show that the distributions of species with high dispersal ability (small seeded) and that are successful in novel environments (exotic species) have shifted upward significantly, enough to maintain their thermal ranges. Endemic species have also shifte...

Parks Are Social

Boom: A Journal of California, 2015

Two years ago, Jon Christensen and Stamen Design began to explore social media generated every da... more Two years ago, Jon Christensen and Stamen Design began to explore social media generated every day in California parks, open spaces and natural areas, from city centers to wilderness areas. So far, they have gathered social media from more than half a million unique users of Instragram, Flickr, Twitter, and Foursquare who have shared content in one or more of the 11,826 parks in California. The project, like this photo essay, shows that parks are social—that is, people do things in parks that they do in the rest of their lives. They also show that diverse Californians will see people like themselves in parks they do. It is hoped that representing this diversity will encourage more California to use their national, state, and local parks.

Don't shoot the messenger

Drug Discovery Today, 2003

spatial history lab 17 June 2009 Bay Area Conservation and Development

This study examines regional land-use questions in the Silicon Valley, and more broadly in the Ba... more This study examines regional land-use questions in the Silicon Valley, and more broadly in the Bay Area, through the historical analysis of open space conservation and urban development trends. Our research began by analyzing larger historical conservation and development trends in the Bay Area. Drawing from our findings, we then created a counterfactual map using GIS and focused our research question on a “what if” proposition—what would have happened to the currently preserved lands in the Silicon Valley had they been developed. The results of this study are currently in review.

The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities

The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, 2017

Chapter 1. Bending the Curve: Ten Scalable Solutions for Carbon Neutrality and Climate Stability

Collabra, 2016

We are living in a world of over seven billion people, with annual greenhouse gas emissions of ap... more We are living in a world of over seven billion people, with annual greenhouse gas emissions of approximately 50 billion tons a year and rising steadily. If continued unabated, the world is on target to warm by about 2 °C in less than 40 years, pushing the climate to a regime unlike any that has been witnessed in the last million years. Nonetheless, we still have time to avert such a catastrophic scenario, or delay its occurrence by several decades to provide human societies and the ecosystem with the time to adjust. In order to mitigate the possibility of climate disruption, we need to recognize that fossil fuel based technologies have become outdated and transform the energy system to that of low-carbon, sustainable and secure energy systems. In addition, we have to mitigate emissions of the four short-lived climate pollutants to bring immediate relief from climate change and protect vulnerable societies. Stability of the climate system involves not only the centrality of scientifi...

Aux Barricades!

Conservation in Practice, 2006

Fortress conservation is making a comeback. Don't be fooled by all the happy talk about

Sitting Out the Big Game

Conservation in Practice, 2005

It's a shame. Conservationists are sitting on the sidelines while the Big Game unfolds before our... more It's a shame. Conservationists are sitting on the sidelines while the Big Game unfolds before our eyes. A major campaign is under way to change the terms of development, alleviate crushing debt, and help poor people around the world live better lives. Successes are being racked up. And conservation and environmental groups are nowhere to be seen. There are 29 groups listed as partners in The Campaign to Make Poverty History at www.one.org. Not one of them is a conservation or environmental organization.

Assessing the flow to low-income urban areas of conservation and environmental funds approved by California’s Proposition 84

PLOS ONE, 2019

Mapping Texts: Combining Text-Mining and Geo-Visualization To Unlock The Research Potential of Historical Newspapers

Paper on mapping texts and combining text-mining and geo-visualization to unlock the research pot... more

Sharing our Stories: Interpreting the Estuary

Multispecies Justice in the Wetlands

European journal of literature, culture and the environment, 2020

This essay discusses the rise of "justice" as a central concept around which environmen... more This essay discusses the rise of "justice" as a central concept around which environmental thought and debates have been organized over the last thirty years, and briefly places the notions of environmental justice and multispecies justice into the more general context of theories of justice since John Rawls. It uses the case of the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve in Los Angeles, whose future is hotly contested between different environmentalist groups, as a case study to illustrate the complex trade-offs that environmental decision-making currently confronts, and to suggest in what ways the invocation of multispecies justice changes the participants in the community of justice and the way in which their claims on humans' moral consideration should be weighed.

Measuring Performance of Water Systems in California

The authors wish to acknowledge Barton H. " Buzz " Thompson, who participated in many i... more The authors wish to acknowledge Barton H. " Buzz " Thompson, who participated in many interviews and discussions essential to the preparation of this working paper, as well as the dozens of people who met and talked with us about performance measurement in water systems throughout California, and the support of the S. The state of information about water in California is woefully inadequate. Given that California has long been a center for innovation in the world's emerging information economy and water is among the state's most precious resources, this is nothing short of shocking. In its 2009 Water Plan, the state Department of Water Resources recognized the inadequacies and inefficiencies of the state's information systems: " Easily retrievable, standardized, and comprehensive baseline data about California urban water use are not available. " The plan went on to note that DWR " agreed to begin the effort of improving information exchange by e...

Mapping Historical Texts: Combining Text-mining & Geo-visualization to Unlock the Research Potential of Historical Newspapers

Strategic Communication to Achieve Carbon Neutrality within the University of California

Author(s): Bales, Roger; Christensen, Jon; Heeren, Alex; Hodges, Heather; Leombruni, Lisa; Rebich... more

Auditing Conservation in an Age of Accountability. Instead of seeing conservation as just a good cause, people are starting to ask, "What are your results?

Conservation in Practice

Are We Consuming Too Much?. It turns out we may be worrying too much about how much we consume and far too little about how to invest

Conservation in Practice, 2005

The answer to the question may seem obvious. But it's not. Not even to Paul Ehrlich, who has spen... more The answer to the question may seem obvious. But it's not. Not even to Paul Ehrlich, who has spent his life warning of impending disaster for our overweening consumer culture. Ehrlich's latest book, One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future, written with his wife Anne, takes its title from a Rudyard Kipling poem. "Recessional" is a cautionary verse about the hubris that went before the fall of Nineveh, the once-thriving capital of the ancient Assyrian empire on the Tigris River in present-day Iraq. The Ehrlichs argue that if we don't curb our wanton ways, a similar fate awaits us. But in a paper recently published in the prestigious Journal of Economic Perspectives (1), Paul Ehrlich joined a group of nearly a dozen of the world's most ambitious ecologists and economists to try to put some hard numbers behind worldwide concerns about sustainability. They boldly entitled the paper "Are We Consuming Too Much?" There are, of course, places where the biggest problem is definitely not that people are consuming too much. It's that they're consuming far too little. Think Africa. Consumption is obviously inadequate when people are dying of malnutrition. But insufficient investment also means that the next generation of Africans will have less than this generation, and the generation after that still less. This is a death spiral of declining consumption and investment, two keys to well-being and sustainability But what about us? And by this, I mean those of us living in the United States and other rich countries. The answer Ehrlich and his colleagues came up with will be shocking to some. And it will come as a surprise to many. It even surprised some of the authors, including Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow.

Reconstructing the conservation history of California over the last 80 years

ABSTRACT Background/Question/Methods Exceptionally rapid human-caused changes in climate and habi... more ABSTRACT Background/Question/Methods Exceptionally rapid human-caused changes in climate and habitats threaten the persistence of biodiversity. Learning from conservation history can help us strategically define future conservation goals. Conservation history describes the process through which current day conservation came to place. Documenting this process entails a spatial and temporal depiction of historical conservation activities, implementation, and achievements. Using historical (1930-1940&#39;s - Wieslander Vegetation Type Maps) and current (2006-2008 - CalVeg) land cover maps, we conducted a change detection analysis to assess the amount and locations of change in the San Francisco Bay Area region. Results/Conclusions In the overlapping area of the historical and current land cover maps (8800km2), 85% has changed over the last 80 years. Of the historical extent, grasslands and urban areas were the land cover classes that transitioned the least, and oak woodlands and agriculture transitioned the most. The greatest transition went into urban areas (from 386km2 to 2144km2), and greatest loss from agriculture (3205 km2 to 515 km2). Using the map of Open Space areas, we linked the chronology of protection, conservation targets, with historical landmarks. Since 1850, 3723 Open Space properties have been &quot;acquired&quot; (2960 km2) in the overlapping area of the historical map. To date we have been able to track the acquisition dates of 1737 of these properties (2116 km2; ca. 70% area). Of those Open space areas with acquisition dates, we observe that the greatest boom of acquisition occurred after 1960, with 1575km2 after 1960 and 541km2 before 1960. This matches the funds provided by the 1955 funding for State Park acquisition, and some of the funds of the 1945 Omnibus Parks Acquisition Act (to acquire coastal areas). There was high variability on which land cover classes were protected and when. After 1960, there was a major increase in agricultural lands, grasslands and redwood forests (after an initial effort in 1920&#39;s) in Open Space properties. We expect to expand and apply this same framework to California&#39;s network of Open Space areas to further our understanding of the history of the region&#39;s protection.

What’s the Matter with San Francisco?

Boom: A Journal of California, 2014

With San Francisco’s economy booming and hand-wringing about the city’s hyper-gentrification, the... more With San Francisco’s economy booming and hand-wringing about the city’s hyper-gentrification, the authors argue that much of the debate surrounding San Francisco’s challenges have been focusing on the wrong things. Changes to the region’s demographics aren’t just squeezing out the middle and working class; they are destroying the conditions that made the Bay Area able to foster social mobility better than any other city in the United States in recent decades.

Win-Win Illusions. Over the past two decades, efforts to heal the rift between poor people and protected areas have foundered. So what next?

Conservation in Practice, 2004

Win-Win Illusions Over the past two decades, efforts to heal the rift between poor people and pro... more

Diverse drivers of contemporary species shifts in the California flora

Background/Question/Methods The differential responses of plant species to global warming are of ... more Background/Question/Methods The differential responses of plant species to global warming are of great interest and grave concern for scientists and conservationists. We used 665234 georeferenced herbaria records to estimate geographic and climatic shifts over the past century in 4426 plant taxa from a wide range of bioclimatic life zones, functional types, and phylogeographic origins. Species distributions were estimated from the Bayesian posterior distribution of parameters defining the relative abundance of specimens of a target species along an environmental gradient, contingent on the sampling distribution of all specimens collected along the gradient, in the geographic locality of the target species. Results/Conclusions Here we show that the distributions of species with high dispersal ability (small seeded) and that are successful in novel environments (exotic species) have shifted upward significantly, enough to maintain their thermal ranges. Endemic species have also shifte...

Parks Are Social

Boom: A Journal of California, 2015

Two years ago, Jon Christensen and Stamen Design began to explore social media generated every da... more Two years ago, Jon Christensen and Stamen Design began to explore social media generated every day in California parks, open spaces and natural areas, from city centers to wilderness areas. So far, they have gathered social media from more than half a million unique users of Instragram, Flickr, Twitter, and Foursquare who have shared content in one or more of the 11,826 parks in California. The project, like this photo essay, shows that parks are social—that is, people do things in parks that they do in the rest of their lives. They also show that diverse Californians will see people like themselves in parks they do. It is hoped that representing this diversity will encourage more California to use their national, state, and local parks.